timberland boots Still splurging the developer

With mansions in their wives’ names, helipads outside their holiday homes and racehorses raking in thousands every year, the big business builders who benefited from the boom continue to live the high life.

Most of the top developers in Nama have now transferred millions of euro worth of properties and land over to their wives and outside the rea timberland boots ch of Nama.

Footage on an RTE Prime Time programme showed the country estates, holiday homes, townhouses and apartments that are still owned by the property tycoons, albeit often through their wives.

Head of Nama Frank Daly said he feels the “same degree of being let down and degree of anger”.

The investigation gave a special focus to Gerry Gannon, who owes 1bn to banks but transferred more than two dozen properties to his wife Margaret since Nama was set up.

The couple live in a multi million euro home in Sutton on the Howth Peninsula, but records show that Mr Gannon’s wife now owns:

He was secretly filmed driving a Land Rover and shopping in Brown Thomas, where he couldn’t even fit all the shopping bags in the boot.

Cork based developer Michael O’Flynn was filmed using his company helicopter, an eight seater Augusta, to fly to race meetings.

Dublin developer Sean Dunne was also featured, a tycoon who now represents a “new flight of the Earls” after he left Ireland.

To date, Nama has not taken any legal action against Mr Gannon or other developers who have transferred property to their wives. And Minister of State at the Department of Finance Martin Mansergh said that they would “always try peaceful persuasion” to get developers to offer their personal assets to repay loans before taking legal action.

But Fine Gael’s Brian Hayes today called on Nama to take “a number of high profile cases” to try to seize properties.

“I think most people would find it astonishing that after two years of Nama we are having this debate.”

Mr Daly said: “I don’t buy the line that what happened was the res timberland boots ponsibility of everybody. W timberland boots hat happened was the responsibility of relatively few.”

Elsewhere, the public might get some answers from disgraced Anglo Irish Bank bosses at an accountancy watchdog tribunal in the New Year.

Nearly two years after the basketcase bank was nationalised, Sean FitzPatrick and David Drumm will have to appear before a group of their p timberland boots eers to explain how they drove the bank into the ground.